University of Virginia Library

While here, the night will never drop,
Go where you will, you meet the shop.
Whirl to the West, you find the park
But turn'd a fuller Noah's ark;—
Whirl to the North, the favourite spot
For us to breakfast and be shot;
The feed and fight alike are o'er,
Chalk Farm is now Chalk Farm no more.
There, Nash, thy plaster town aspires,—
Retreat of Moorfields and Black Friars.
The stucco fine, the gravel finer;
The lamps divine, the lake diviner.—
The whole affair superbly pretty!
The whole,—the trader and his city.
There pant, uneasy for their life,
Fat pair, the aldērman and wife;
There groans the Genius of some ward,
For twelve revolving months, my Lord!
The bulky owner of Molasses
Envies his happier brother asses:
The worthy, rich from porcine slaughter,
Curses the day he saw its water;
All round the wretch so ultra fine—
He dreads to stir, sit, sleep, or dine.
Yet there, if men their eyes will ope,
They'll find en costume à la Hope,
Temptation fresh from London Wall,
The beauty of the Easter ball;
From three months finishing in France
Return'd, with Death in every glance;
A half De Stael, half Eloise,
To trample the piano's keys—
To blot black beetles upon paper—
To light the “Muse's midnight taper;”
To sigh for “dear Count Strogonoff,”
(A valet that nigh whisk'd her off;)
To dream of “Marquis Romanzini,
(You'd buy the scoundrel for a guinea;)
To heave the breast, and roll the eye,
And lisp, “Di tanti palpiti!”
Yet, in those cit-infested valleys,
Before for polar frost he sallies,
To drive in Tartar skulls the sense
Of “Honi soit qui mal y pense;”
As no man's fitter for this barter,
Than he who once has “caught a Tartar;”
Gay H*tf*d rears his Tuscan dome,
For lordly fashion's lordliest home.